newbie

[nhpbi]

hi,
  I am new to Cognos...would like to pick up some skills by going through documentation and some self handson experiment. Cognos encompass a full product suite and I am abit lost as in which tool for which purpose. Can some guru out there start me off by telling me which product I should concentrate first, and is there any sequence for installation, eg PP then RN etc...

many thanx

[Blue]

First of all Cognos has 4 broad groups of tools - Application Development, Business Intelligence, Performance Management, and Miscelaneous tools.

Application Development - 3 main products: PowerHouse 4GL (terminal), PowerHouse Web (browser), and Axiant 4GL (client server).  In turn PowerHouse 4GL is a suite of tools - Quick, Quiz, and QTP.  There were some others such as Inquizitive and Architect as well.

Business Intelligence - this is broken into current and non-current tools (current meaning what Cognos will sell you today).

BI current tools - primarily one suite of tools called Cognos 8 BI.  This contains Analysis Studio (OLAP), Report Studio (reports), Query Studio (ad-hoc), Access Manager (security), Cognos Connection (web portal), and Framework Manager (meta data).  Add-ons are Metric Studio (scorecard), Event Studio (event management), and Data Manager (ETL).

BI non-current tools - ReportNet (reporting), PowerPlay (OLAP), PowerPlay Web (OLAP), Transformer (OLAP meta data), BI Architect (meta data), Scenario (data mining), Visualizer (dash board), Metric Manager (score card), UpFront (web portal), 4Thought (predictive analysis), and Data Merchant (data broker).

Performance Management - Planning (was Adaytum), Finance, Consolidation, plus some pre-defined data mart plug-ins for mainstream packages such as SAP and PeopleSoft.

Miscelaneous Tools - Power2000 (powerfull code conversion tool originally developed for year 2000 remediation projects), SDK (Java based I believe), etc.

So if you want to get into where the most money is being made I would recommend either Cognos 8 BI - Report Studio and/or Cognos Planning as your first stop.

Bluey